Impact case study database

Context:

The IETF ( https://www.ietf.org/) is a key international organisation developing technical standards for the Internet. It has convened since 1986 as an open community of network operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with smooth operation and evolution of the Internet. IETF standards, known as RFCs, are widely implemented, and describe critical infrastructure components of the Internet. Dr Perkins has been involved in IETF since the mid-1990s, co-authoring >30 RFCs, chairing the Audio/Video Transport (1998–2008), Multiparty Multimedia Session Control Working Group (2000–2007), and Real-time Media Congestion Control Working Groups (2016–). He chairs the Internet Research Task Force ( https://irtf.org/), the research arm of IETF, and is a member of the Internet Architecture Board ( https://iab.org/)

WebRTC ( https://webrtc.org/) is a free, open source, browser extension that brings native (built-in) real-time audio-visual conferencing to the web for the first time. Developed by IETF and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), WebRTC comprises network protocol extensions to transport interactive multimedia traffic and JavaScript APIs to allow applications to use these features. From the first cross-browser video call in February 2013, WebRTC has been adopted by all major web browsers, desktop and mobile, supporting applications including Facebook Messenger, Google Meet and Hangouts, Discord, Snapchat, Cisco WebEx, Microsoft Teams, and Skype.

Development of circuit breakers and congestion control feedback

Dr Perkins led development of circuit breakers and congestion control feedback to ensure that WebRTC is safe to deploy, made scalability improvements to make WebRTC feasible to deploy on older 3G/4G wireless links and poor-quality residential networks, and was lead author of the WebRTC Media Transport protocol specification in IETF.

Dr Perkins led development of the circuit breaker algorithm [3.1−3.2], worked with Varun Singh (CEO/founder of callstats.io, the leading performance monitoring and management service for WebRTC) and Zahed Sarker at Ericsson Research to validate its behaviour [3.3], and brought the research results into the IETF Audio/Video Transport Core Maintenance working group, leading to publication of the circuit breaker extensions as an IETF standard in March 2017 [5.1]. Through the WebRTC working group, Dr Perkins gained consensus that the circuit breaker should be implemented in WebRTC applications. The circuit breaker is referenced as “MUST implement” in the WebRTC media transport specification ( DOI:10.17487/RFC8834) [5.8]. Independently, the Real-time Streaming Protocol standard ( DOI:10.17487/RFC7826), a core component of the 3GPP Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service, cited a draft of the circuit breaker as “MUST implement” [5.1].

Circuit breakers are an essential backstop to protect the network from errant applications, ensuring user experience is maintained, and that growing deployment of interactive real-time media doesn’t disrupt other traffic. More sophisticated applications adapt media quality to the available network capacity, rather than using the all-or-nothing approach provided by the circuit breaker. Dr Perkins co-chairs the Real-time Media Congestion Avoidance Techniques working group in the IETF ( https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/rmcat/about/), developing congestion control algorithms for future versions of WebRTC, and was a key member of the design team that developed congestion control feedback for WebRTC to allow interoperability of congestion control algorithms from different vendors, and performed simulations to demonstrate its effectiveness and low-overhead [5.5-5.6]. Dr Perkins’ work on Explicit Congestion Notification [3.4] is seeing interest for future versions of WebRTC [5.5] and was also published as an IETF standard.

Dr Perkins was editor of the IETF WebRTC media transport standard [5.7] that incorporates these results and extensions, and has been a long-term editor of the Session Description Protocol [5.8] signalling standard. These are two of the mandatory-to-implement core specifications that define WebRTC.

Development of internet-based communication for low-capacity links

Dr Perkins collaborated with engineers from Ericsson, Huawei, and Vidyo to develop extensions to the RTP standards that improve its scalability and reduce overheads, allowing WebRTC to work effectively on low-capacity links, including dial-up connections in developing regions, and on poor quality 3G/4G wireless links. These have enhanced the reach of WebRTC, allowing it to compete with traditional telephony in developing regions, and providing a more robust user experience in wireless environments [5.2-5.4].

Circuit breaks and congestion control feedback have facilitated the growth of WebRTC

WebRTC is integral to a new ecosystem of applications and services such as Skype for Business, Zoom, and Google Duo, facilitating communication in areas such as education, telemedicine and business. A Google news search for WebRTC finds 71,400 articles relating to the technology, its applications, and companies building on the platform. For example, Attend Anywhere has led in the transformation of healthcare delivery across the UK and Australia, initially using Vidyo, and then WebRTC from 2014 to provide high-quality secure video consultations across the healthcare sector [5.9].

The global restriction in travel in response to the coronavirus pandemic combined with the cross-platform browser capability of WebRTC has facilitated real-time audio-visual communication for business, healthcare and education across the Internet [5.10f]. In the first 4 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, real-time voice and video has grown more than 200% in traffic and daily conferencing minutes together with 20-fold increases in users of conferencing platforms [5.10a]. In April 2020, Google announced that over 2 million new users were connecting on Google Meet, collectively spending more than 3,800 years of secure meetings each single day [5.10b]. This has continued to be supported as people work and learn from home, with 100,000 schools across 20 countries connecting using Zoom [5.10c] . The UofG work on circuit breakers, congestion control feedback, and scalability for WebRTC have helped the network adapt to these changes [5.10d], allowing businesses to connect with customers, patients with their doctors [5.9], students with their teachers, and friends and families across the globe to stay in touch during the global pandemic. The resultant global market is anticipated to reach USD50 billion by 2026 [5.10e].